What’s your strategy for maintaining your home?  The If It’s Not Broke, Don’t Fix It approach is a strategy, but it’s a poor one that doesn’t help you proactively prevent emergencies and protect your investment.  Planning for and scheduling your home maintenance tasks is a much better and more organized way to guarantee maintenance activities happen on time.  Here is an organized strategy for planning for and cuing home maintenance activities.

1. Identify your home maintenance needs.  If you haven’t thought about this before, consider using a resource to help you identify what typically needs to be done and when.  The Simply Placed Home Maintenance Record Book is a good resource.  The home inspection report as well as a web search are other ways to identify common home maintenance tasks.  You might also consider looking at the manuals for your home appliances for ideas for routine maintenance activities.
2. Assign a time period and frequency to each task.  Many tasks are seasonal in nature like lawn aeration, gutter cleaning or winterization activities.  Some tasks will have less to do with a season and more to do with frequency.  These may be things like changing smoke detector batteries every 6 months, inspecting the exterior paint once a year or flipping  and cleaning mattresses every 3 months.  For each task you identify, assign a time period for doing it as well as a frequency.
3. Schedule your tasks on a home maintenance calendar or task list.  This could be on a paper or electronic calendar or a paper or electronic task list.  If you’re using an electronic calendar, consider creating a unique Home Maintenance calendar.  Enter the tasks on your calendar or task list and, if using an electronic tool, set up automation for recurring tasks.  Scheduling these activities is a critical step toward your ability to successfully complete the work on time.

Spending some time planning for you home maintenance needs allows you to be proactive to protecting your home, may reduce emergency breakdowns and helps you budget time and money for keeping your home in working order.

Simply Placed can help you create your home maintenance plan, locate vendors and resources to help with maintenance activities and manage your maintenance projects.  Contact us to learn more.